Three people died after typhoon-like winds reportedly sucked them out of their apartment windows in a high-rise building, as violent rain and hailstorms battered southeastern China over the past week.
At least seven people lost their lives in the extreme weather, which began last Sunday and continued until Tuesday, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday.
The storm engulfed nine cities in China’s Jiangxi province including the provincial city Nanchang, with more than 93,000 people in 54 counties affected, the Jiangxi provincial emergency flood control headquarters said.
The storm also caused 150 million yuan (about $21.1 million) in economic losses, and damaged more than 5,700 hectares (14,000 acres) of crops, according to the agency.
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More than 5,400 houses were damaged, and 1,600 of the people affected had to be evacuated to safety, according to CNN.
China’s National Metrological Center issued an orange weather alert at around 6:00pm Tuesday, for severe convective weather in several areas of southeastern China.
This marks the first orange alert issued since 2013, according to the state-run Global Times.
The orange alert is the second highest level – lower than red – in the country’s four-tier, colour-coded weather warning system, followed by yellow and blue.
The storm claimed four lives and injured at least 10 people in Nanchang, where it had faced heavy rainfall, thunderstorms, and winds on Sunday, according to CCTV.
Among them was an 11-year-old boy and his grandmother in her 60s who reportedly fell to their deaths from the 20th floor of a residential building during the storm.
A man named Xu said the wind swept his 64-year-old mother and 11-year-old son out of their apartment windows after blowing out all the living room and bedroom windows, according to the South China Morning Post.
The third victim was a 60-year-old woman from the same building who was reportedly sucked out from her 11th-bedroom window by extreme wind, her husband named Wan told the newspaper.
All three were confirmed dead, and authorities were investigating the circumstances surrounding how they fell, according to CCTV.
It was suggested that extremely strong winds had ripped the floor-to-ceiling door-size windows out of their apartments in the middle of the night, sweeping all three victims to their deaths, according to media reports.
